MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the early 1980s, devastating civil wars that were a direct result of U.S. foreign policy gripped Central America and produced the displacement of thousands of migrants. Eventually, many of these migrants made their way across the U.S. border seeking refuge in the nascent and fragile Sanctuary Movement. Children played an important role in these migrations as they accompanied their guardians or made the trek themselves across borders. Yet, media coverage of the migration flows erased the presence of children and contributed to a collective cultural amnesia about the tangled relationship between foreign policy, childhood, and migration. Recent coverage of the 2014 unaccompanied minors’ trek exacerbates this historical amnesia by portraying child migration as a wholly new and unprecedented event. This paper explores the ways in which media coverage of the early 1980s marginalized children’s presence in this migration period by comparing coverage of the mid – 1980s INS investigation and eventual indictment of Sanctuary Movement leaders with one of the most prominent cultural productions of children in the migration movement – the PBS documentary El Norte. While the film focuses on the precarious existence of two teenage siblings making their way, and eventually their life, across the border and endows the youth with an agency rarely seen in media outlets, similar depictions are not found in news coverage of the period. By deploying the theoretical framework of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, this paper suggests that an erasure of children’s presence in the migration flows was an American attempt to traverse and appropriate the national traumas of other countries in order to ameliorate unsettling consequences of Cold War politics in the Third World.

Bethany Sharpe Bash225@g.uky.edu PhD Candidate, University of Kentucky